Disney Infinity cost $100 million to develop

Disney Infinity, Disney Interactive’s attempt to clone the success of Skylanders, is now available in stores. But you’ll never believe how much it cost to produce and just what effect is has had on Disney’s video game division.

The wall Street Journal recently published a behind-the-scenes look at Disney Infinity and, according to their sources, the game (and its associated toy line) cost more than $100 million to produce. Only Star Wars: The Old Republic can boast a higher production budget.

But this gargantuan project comes at a cost for Disney Interactive. Internal development within the company has ceased and all of their future projects (Fantasia: Music Evolved, Star Wars: Battlefront, the Visceral Studios Star Wars game, and Kingdom Hearts III) are co-productions with other publishers. According to The Wall Street Journal’s report, devotion to Disney Infinity also caused the axe to fall on several other titles including a tie-in game based on this Summer’s Iron Man 3 and an interanlly-developed Star Wars game.

But I think Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO, best summed up the importance of Disney Infinity’s launch: “If Infinity does well, it bodes very well for the bottom line of this unit. If it doesn’t do well, the opposite will be the case.”